Quality of Service Support for Legacy Applications

*nix Mischiefs: The New Frontiers

Amit Singh, 1998Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey

Aberration in behavior is inescapable for almost any entity capable of
behaving. Computers are particularly prone to misbehaving. It has been
discussed aplenty that software misbehavior is an inherent aspect of the
stored-program concept. A widely held belief is that while Microsoft systems
are excessively prone to malicious programs (especially viruses) wreaking
havoc, UNIX and derived systems are not. People have tried to refute this
claim, and several *nix "viruses" have been created. This paper
evaluates some of these claims and their counter claims. Furthermore, it
attempts a broad look at the kind of "mischiefs" (methodologies
of making software misbehave) more than a quarter century of UNIX has led to.
No attempt is made to classify malicious code into categories like viruses,
worms, trojans etc., for which extensive documentation exists.

A light-hearted discussion on the need for, and the repercussions of knowing too many programming languages. The trick refers to a piece of code representing the ubiquitous "Hello World" program whose syntactic structure is such that it is valid code for C, DOS Assembly, FORTRAN, Unix shell and Perl. The program outputs the same string ("Hello, World!") upon execution in all cases.

GUI Development Under Linux

Amit Singh, PC Quest, pp. 30-32, July 1997

An exploration of some key toolkits and systems for developing graphical user interfaces on a Unix or Unix-like platform.